Five reasons you should still be watching 'Fringe'

For those of us who remain loyal fans of Fox's sci-fi mind-bender Fringe, the current season's ratings bring both good news and bad.

The bad news? The season premiere drew as many viewers as an X Factor re-reun, and ratings have been dropping ever since. The good? It doesn't really matter, since this is the show's final season.

But here's the thing: Fringe is going out with a bang. Fewer and fewer people may be watching, but the finality of Season 5 -- even if it's an abbreviated 13 episodes -- is allowing the show's creators to take greater storytelling risks that, yes, may have shed some of those viewers along the way. But it's certainly building toward a more satisfying conclusion than the series' most obvious influence, The X-Files. Well, presuming Fringe doesn't end with Walter Bishop being tried before a military tribunal.

With this last season halfway over, and a new episode on deck tonight, here are five reasons to still watch:

1) In an inspired twist, this entire last season is almost a re-boot of the show, jumping off from a one-off Season 4 episode that was set in the year 2036. The Fringe team has found its way to the future, and is racing through the final episodes in an effort to reconstruct Walter's hidden plan to defeat those creepy, fedora-favoring Observers. It's a great payoff for seasons' worth of fleeting and mostly unexplained appearances by the time-shifting baldies. Turns out they were the bad guys.

2) John Noble's performance as Walter Bishop has been Emmy-worthy all along, yet he remains un-nominated for the role, which became a particularly glaring oversight after the introduction of the alternate universe storyline that found Noble playing two very different characters: the addled genius Walter and his cold, calculating doppleganger, Walternate.

3) It's a rarity for sure, but Fringe has pulled off the inevitable will-they-or-won't-they coupling of Anna Torv's Olivia Dunham and Joshua Jackson's Peter Bishop, in part by not letting it overtake the show's central mythology. Plus, with the flash forward of this season, we actually skip through a lot of that early romantic stuff to find them as an established couple re-acquainted with their now-grown daughter. And that part of the storyline, in fact, is what is giving the final season an unexpected emotional push.

4) In the show's longest-running gag, Walter is still coming up with new ways to mangle FBI agent Astrid Farnsworth's first name, from Asterisk, Astro and Aspirin to Afro. He even called her Ostrich once.

5) Finally, with its flash-forward into the future and an epic battle against the Observers in the offing -- and the hope that we'll revisit Lincoln and the rest of the gang in the alternate universe before this all ends -- it's a pretty safe bet that this particular J.J. Abrams series is not going to end with Peter, Olivia and Walter ambling out of some church into a wash of heavenly light. Please?

So, are you still watching Fringe, or did you give up somewhere along the way? What do you think of this final season?

Follow Matt Sebastian at slicingupeyeballs.com or @slicingyeyeballs.